The Living Fire

Starred review from January 25, 2010
Hirsch, a longtime poetry teacher and now the president of the Guggenheim Foundation, is an accessible and widely beloved poet and advocate for poetry. His work combines a playful, tender sense of humor, awareness of Jewish heritage, love for and identification with Central European and Russian poetry, and an intimate American voice that seeks to elucidate what mysteries it can. This, his first retrospective collection, selects from each of his seven previous collections, published between 1981 and 2008. The early poems attempt to characterize people in terms of and against the everyday world that surrounds them, and the art that depicts that world, as in “Still Life: An Argument”: “the knife/ keeps falling and falling, but never/ falls. That knife could be us.” Middle poems pay homage to and learn from classical culture and world religions: “...I believe the saint:/ Nothing stays the same/ in the shimmering heat.” More recent poems confront aging and family (“My father in the night shuffling from room to room/ is no longer a father or a husband or a son,// but a boy standing on the edge of a forest”), while the newest wonder about the poet’s own mortality, and track love lost and found. Hirsch has many wise things to say; this book is a trove of them.